The HR team was not short of answers - it had written the same forty of them hundreds of times. What employees lacked was a way to ask the handbook directly, and to see their own leave balance without a ticket.
The starting position
The company makes automotive components at five sites in north and west India. HR operations - six people - answered about 520 policy emails a month: leave rules, the travel and expense policy, notice periods, which holidays applied at which site. A quarter of them were employees asking for their own leave balance, which they could see in HRStop, the company's HR system, if they remembered how.
Every answer was correct and every answer was typed by hand. The handbook ran to 64 pages, and the team's real knowledge base was its sent folder.
What they set up
One SupaCortex project, "People desk", on the Growth plan. Setup took the HR operations lead and one person from IT about a week, most of it spent on the documents.
- The handbook, leave policy, travel and expense policy, code of conduct and the five site holiday lists uploaded as Word and PDF files, each with a category and marked trust tier 1 (official).
- The chat widget in identified mode on the intranet: the intranet signs a short-lived token for each signed-in employee, so the assistant knows who is asking.
- The HRStop product connector, so "how much leave do I have?" is answered with the employee's own balance, fetched for the verified employee and nobody else.
- Workspace chat for the HR team itself, to find a clause quickly when an unusual question still reaches the inbox.
What went wrong first
Two versions of the leave policy had been uploaded - the old one and the one revised in April, which changed the carry-forward limit. In the first week the assistant answered a carry-forward question from the old one, correctly citing it. An employee noticed the date in the citation and reported it; the old policy was deleted the same day. The citation is what made the mistake visible.
The holiday lists caused the other problem. All five were titled "Holiday list 2026", and "is 14 January a holiday?" was sometimes answered from another site's list. Renaming each one with the site, and adding the site to the first line of each list, fixed it - answers now say which site they apply to.
The result
After eight weeks, policy emails to the HR inbox were down from about 520 a month to about 230. Leave balance questions moved almost entirely to the assistant - about 900 a month - and the HR team now spends its inbox time on the cases that need judgement: exceptions, disputes and anything personal.
What did not change, by design: questions about complaints, grievances and health are answered from the policy, which names the people to contact. The assistant explains the process; people handle the case.
ChatGPT
Claude
Perplexity
Grok